Meet The Researcher Who Wants To Get Dogs Talking To Humans In Five Years

It sounds like a joke: A team of researchers, one of whom
worked at Google, is figuring out how to get dogs talking to
humans.

But it's not a joke. A team at Georgia Tech, led by
Dr. Melody Jackson, is
developing wearable technology that makes it easier for
assistance dogs, and military dogs to communicate with their
owners.

Down the road, as the
technology advances, the hope is that dogs will be able to
clearly communicate with all owners.

The project is called
FIDO, which stands
for "facilitating interactions for dogs with occupations."

Jackson is a director at the
school's BrainLab. She's also an assistance dog trainer.On her team is Thad Starner,
who was a technical lead for Google Glass, and Clint
Zeagler, another researcher who will be focused on
textiles.

In her work at the BrainLab,
she tries to understand brain signals, and uses sensors. She was
also investigating computer interfaces for people with
disabilities.

Working with Starner, she one
day realized they could use wearable technology to get humans and
dogs communicating. The way it works is a dog wears a vest with
sensors that can send signals to the owner.

The research is still new, but
Jackson says it's showing signs of promise.

Here's an edited transcript of a conversation we had with her
about her research.

Business Insider:Why don’t you just give some
general background, you’ve been in this field a while, give us a
little bit on your background and what you’re trying to work
towards.

Melody Jackson: Essentially what happened
is my lab partner Thad Starner, who is one of the pioneers of the
wearable computing field, he and I have shared a lab since 2006
and we have collaborated on a lot of things, and we have a
colleague from industrial design, Clint
Zeagler, who is an expert in textiles and things like
that. And it turns out that I’m also an assistance dog puppy
raiser for Canine Companions for Independence, so I’ve trained
dogs for assistance dog work since 1995. For some reason, it took
us awhile, but we finally made the connection that, "Wow, this
wearable technology might be useful for assistance dog
communication." And I can give you a couple of scenarios.

One of my students, who has a guide dog, was traveling between
classes one day, along a familiar route, just a sidewalk that he
knew well, and the dog stopped still and wouldn’t move. That
usually means there’s something in the way. So he got his
collapsible cane out and he tried to feel around if to see if
there was anything in the way and he couldn’t feel any
obstruction at all. So he asked to go again, and the dog wouldn’t
move. So he thought, “well, you know he’s just being a dog.”
Though it’s rare, sometimes the assistance dogs are just dogs, so
he thought, “Maybe he’s sniffing something.” So he gave him a
little correction and said, “You know, you’re going now.” And so
the dog said, “Okay,” — and they both stepped right into wet
cement.

If the dog could have, lets say, pressed a button on his guide
dog harness that would definitively say, “We need to go around
this,” he could have saved him a potentially dangerous situation.
If had slipped in the cement and fallen, or if it had been a hole
or something like that that he could have fallen into, it would
be really important for the dog to be able to tell him what’s
going on, "We need to go around this, I'm not just being
disobedient, we need to go around this."

So other scenarios: hearing dogs. The way hearing dogs work is
that they alert the owner to a sound, and they will run to the
source of the sound. So if a baby’s crying, they’ll say put their
paw on the owner’s knee and then run into the baby’s room and
you’ll know that that’s the baby crying. Or if it’s a doorbell
they will run to the door. But what if it’s a tornado siren? How
does the dog tell you that that’s what that is? So you can train
the dogs to differentiate the sounds, in fact we’re doing that
right now with one of our demo dogs, and then they could press a
different button the vest for different sounds so you’d know that
it’s the tornado siren. So the dog could say, “That’s the tornado
siren,” and the owner could make a much better decision on how to
react.

Third scenario. Let’s say you have a search and rescue dog, right
now the search and rescue dogs pretty much have to be controlled
within line of sight because they have voice and hand signals,
and things like that. And once the dog finds — let’s say they’re
searching for a person — once the dog finds the person, they have
a small padded stick hanging off of their collar called a
bringsel. And what the dog does is it puts the
bringsel in their mouth and then runs back to
the handler to say, “Hey, I found it, I found somebody.” But what
if that bringsel was electronic? And if the dog
hit it, it would geolocate to a GPS satellite and tell the whole
team, the rescue team, the handler, everybody exactly where that
person was at that moment. And then the dog could stay with the
person and do whatever needs to happen with that person until the
team got there.

There are all kinds of ways that this could be used. And the more
we think about it, the more uses we find for it.

BI:And how long have you been working on
it?

MJ: It’s probably been about six or seven months
that we’ve actually been engaged in the building of the sensors
and testing them. So a fairly new project.

A dog in
training.Adil
Dellawalla

BI: How do you train dogs to
know what to do and where to move? What kind of sensors do you
put on there? What kind of challenges do you find with
that?

MJ: Great question. The good thing about
assistance dogs and working dogs in general is that they’re
usually already trained to do a lot of the things we need them to
do, our sensors are based on the natural behavior of dogs. So
dogs can hold things in their mouth, they can bite down, they can
take something and tug it, pull it, they can touch things with
their nose. So all of the sensors that we’ve developed so far are
just based on natural dog movement.

We have two different form factors for a bite sensor. So that
bringsel I was telling you about with search
and rescue dogs, we actually made an electronic brings-all, so
that when the dog bites down on it, it actually sends a signal to
a computer, a little microprocessor on the vest, and then we can
do whatever we want to with that. We can hook it to a GPS, or we
can have it emit a tone, or speak words, or whatever we need.

And then we have another form factor which is a little larger,
sort of an oval shape, that’s a little easier for the dogs to
grip. We also have a tug sensor, which is essentially a rubber
ball at the end of a strap. The dog tugs on the ball with just
enough force to activate the sensor. And then the last one is
that we have already tested is a proximity sensor. So very
similar to the paper towel dispensers that you might see in
restrooms, where you wave your hand and the paper towel magically
appears. We used very similar technology so that the dog waves
their nose over it and it activates the sensor. And what was
really fascinating about that is that the dogs, we started out
teaching the dogs to touch the sensor with their nose, which is
what I thought they’d be able to do, and the dogs all by
themselves figured out very quickly that all they needed to do
was wave their nose past it. So, we were very pleased with that,
it was a “Wow!” moment.

BI:How did you figure out when the dog is
truly understanding what you're training it on and how much can
you trust it? I imagine they get it right here and there, but
they need to get it right 100% of the time, right?

MJ: You’re absolutely right. That is
obviously one of the things that we’re going to be researching is
what is the best way to ensure that the dog truly has an
understanding of the task. And that’s really a dog-training
problem. As a dog trainer,
I’m quite confident that we can train the dogs to be 100%
reliable on what they’re telling us. I really have no qualms
about that.

BI:How far can this go? Right now,
we’re talking about assistance dogs and a limited set of things.
In five or ten years, do you see this research expanding
significantly to the point where anyone’s normal pet dog can be
wearing some sort of sensor and getting trained and being able to
say, “I don’t really like this food,” or “You have the music on
too loud, and quite frankly it’s bothering me.” How much
communication can this lead to between humans and dogs on a
non-assistant, non-specialized level?

MJ: Of course we have enough ideas to
easily fill 10 years of work. I love your examples, because those
are indeed things that you might want to know.

Here’s another scenario: You’re at work, and your dog is home by
himself, and he needs to go out, but he doesn’t have anyone home
to let him out. He could press a button on his vest or on the
door that would text you, "Hey, dog needs to go out.” You
activate your home security system to open a doggie door, your
video camera on the dog’s collar let’s you know that you’re dogs
out there, if he’s done his business or come back in the house,
and then you lock up your house again. I’d love to have that!

BI: That sounds great for anyone that has a pet.

MJ: Another thing, police have told us and
home security is that one of the best things you can have in your
home is a barking dog. What if that dog could press a button to
alert you that someone's in your yard? Now a dog might say "a
squirrel's in the yard" but almost all of my dogs, if there's
barking, there's really somebody out there. So, if you could
teach them to let you know, you turn on your video camera and
say, "Yeah there's somebody there, but it's the mailman or that
person isn't supposed to be there, call 911." That's something
you could use at home that I could see being a definite thing.

BI: Do you envision this as a
business?

MJ: We're in
the early research stages, so we're not looking to commercialize
anything in the next year or two for sure. We just received
funding from the National Science Foundation to do this work for
the next two years, which we're very excited about. So at the end
of the two years we should have a much more viable and robust and
accurate sensor.

I expect probably initially we'll work with the assistance dog
groups that are our partners on this project and also we're
discussing things with military training agencies for military
working dogs.

This could be a huge game-changer for military applications, if
you can imagine a bomb-sniffing dog that can tell you what kind
of bomb it found. There's also another side of this where the
handler can send remote messages to the dog through electronics
as well, such as maybe a small vibrating motor that's inside the
vest somewhere so that the handler could give a command like ,"Go
sweep that side of the woods, go off to the right." Sort of
remote control for the dog. But also the handler might be able to
give him a command by vibrating the middle of the chest meaning,
"come back to me now." So, the way military dogs are controlled
right now is voice and hand signals, which means that they now
have to be able to see their handler, which means their handler
has to be out in the open and makes them a sniper target.

So, being able to have electronics that the dog and the person
can communicate with each other allows the handler to be safer
and the dog to be safer. Right now, the way a bomb-sniffing dog
finds a bomb, they lie down and they start barking. So the
handler gets there and obviously that lets the enemy know that
you found it and that you got a dog team on it. What we could do
is the dog could find the bomb and geolocate, be able to press
something on their vest or pull something on their vest that
would connect with a satellite that would tell you where it was
and then the dog returns to the handler. So the dog's out of
danger, the handler is never in danger, they can stay hidden the
whole time. So we're thinking this can be a huge safety procedure
that would enhance the quality of what we can do on the ground
with dog teams and keep them out of harm's way as much as
possible.

BI: Why now? Is there new
technology that enables something like this right now?

MJ: We've finally gotten it small enough and
powerful and with good enough battery life that it's feasible to
really use this stuff, get it out of laboratory, put it on and
wear it.

BI: How would a human
communicate with a dog? Would it be through their smartphone?
Through Google Glass?

MJ: The guide dog might not need the
handler to wear anything if they don't need to communicate to the
dog anything through the FIDO system or through the vest. You
might just have a speaker on the vest that would say, "We need to
go around this," or something that would go to a Bluetooth
earpiece, which is what we're going to be implementing, but you
wouldn't necessarily need something as powerful as the Google
Glass for something like that.

However, you can certainly see a hearing dog, that would make a
lot of sense that you could have a text message that would come
up in your head-mounted display that would say, "Hey, I just
heard the tornado siren, we better do something about this." It
sort of depends on the application.

BI: How else can you get the
dogs to communicate with humans?

MJ: There are a couple of other things that
we're looking at for these sensors. One thing is, if we can put
sensors on the dog that senses body position of the dog, there
are two things we can do with that. One is we might be able to
interpret natural dog language, which is largely postural.

Dogs communicate very differently than we do. They don't
necessarily talk like we do, but if they bow down with their ears
up and their tail up and wagging, that's called a play bow and
that means they're happy, but if they stand up on their tip-toes
and and their tail is still that's an aggressive posture.

We might be able to interpret natural dog language with these
sensors, put these on and tell what the dogs are doing.

Another thing we could do is teach the dogs to do specific
gestures, like that bow is something my dog knows how to do, that
might be instead of pushing or activating a sensor, just having
the dog go into a position that it might not normally go into to
communicate something. It's called activity recognition and that's
another way that we're going with those.

The third thing that we can do with that is possibly temperament
testing to evaluate dogs that might be suitable for different
types of work. So you need a dog that's got some aggression for
police dog work, you can see if the dog has tendency towards that
with the sensors. If you need one that's very docile and friendly
for assistance dog work, you might be able to evaluate the dog's
temperament. These are just ideas that we're throwing around, and
with the technology that we're developing should be something
that's possible.

BI: It's interesting to think about how posture is so
important.

MJ: In many, many years of dog training, my
experience is that a lot of people anthropomorphize their dogs.

A classic example: you come in, and somebody has messed on the
floor and you find the dog and the dog looks cowed and the dog's
sort of crawling through the room looking cowed and so people
say, "He's guilty, he knows he did that and he's guilty and he
knows he should be punished." Well that's not true at all. What
the dog is reacting to is your anger. The dog doesn't remember he
messed on the floor, he doesn't even know he did it, he doesn't
remember that, all he knows is that you came in and you're mad so
what he's trying to do is calm you down and that's a calming
signal.

A dog being submissive, putting his head down, putting his tail
between his legs, that's a submissive posture, and what he's
trying to do is calm you down. He doesn't know why you're upset.
So that's the main thing, that a lot of people misread dogs'
language and don't really know what that's all about. So it might
lead to a better understanding of what our dogs are really saying
to us, "I'm frightened of what you're saying right now, of the
way you're yelling right now. I'm not remorseful because I ate
the bacon on the counter." They don't even remember that they did
that.

So I think people think they know their dogs, but a lot of people
do misinterpret it.